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Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
I think we don't know that - fossil fuels have let us reduce the number of farmers - but since we can grow enough food on the land we have, I think we can grow enough in smaller farms. The Amish farm sustainably, and they are MORE efficient in terms of productivity.
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We do know that fossil fuels are primarily responsible for allowing population to grow to the size it is, not just due to food production, but also due to pharmaceuticals, sanitation, etc, etc. There isn't an area that isn't improved by hydrocarbons. There is no chance the Amish are more productive. They essentially produce what they need, and little more, whereas modern farmers produce thousands to millions times more than they consume.
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My main point is - what we are doing now WILL FAIL. We are RUINING the soil, and it is eroding away rapidly. AND we are using deep aquifers - this is also unsustainable.
We CANNOT continue to use factory farming methods - for several reasons. The system is GOING to fail - we just don't know what will be the first thing to fail.
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All CAPS has NO ABILITY to make a FALSE STATEMENT into a TRUE STATEMENT.
Where is the evidence that modern farming methods will fail? Sure, there are unintended consequences that need to be addressed, but decades of modern techniques hasn't failed yet, so what would make them fail in the relevant future?
I suppose the claim that modern farming methods are unsustainable is absolutely true, just as anything ever is unsustainable, making the phrase meaningless without giving a timeframe. In other words, unsustainable when?
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I like the quote from Wendell Berry:
"Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm - which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems."
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There may be something to leveraging nature to make it work better for us, but the simple fact is that a farmer not utilizing modern techniques is at a competitive disadvantage, meaning if it were possible to get the yields needed at a low enough cost to be competitive by utilizing old farming methods, people would already be doing it.